planted city

Truth!

(Source: Post Carbon Institute)

From The Hill’s E2 Wire:

Most undecided voters want more action from President Obama and Congress to fight global warming, and a substantial percentage say the topic will influence their ballot for president, a new poll shows.

The joint Yale University/George Mason University (GMU) survey found that undecided voters’ beliefs about the existence and causes of global warming are far closer to President Obama’s likely voters than GOP rival Mitt Romney’s.

Sixty-four percent of undecided voters believe Obama should be doing more to address climate change, and 72 percent say Congress should be doing more.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Related:

• ‘Climate Change in the American Mind: The Potential Impact of Global Warming on the 2012 Presidential Election’ (Yale)
• ‘Climate Change Haunts U.S. Election’ (Montreal Gazette)

Tools for Change: ‘The Story of Change’ (Video)

Can shopping save the world? The Story of Change urges viewers to put down their credit cards and start exercising their citizen muscles to build a more sustainable, just and fulfilling world.

More here.

Every time I walk past this Margaret Mead quote it leaves me with a smile. If you want to check it out for yourself it’s on the wall of ‘The Foundation’ restaurant at 7th and Main.

An important reminder of the bigger picture from Annie Leonard in the New York Times article, ’Individual Actions Just Don’t Add Up’. You can check out the rest of the article here.

Leonard is the author and director of the ‘Story of Stuff Project’. Their new animated film is ‘The Story of Change: Why Citizens (Not Shoppers) Hold the Key to a Better World’.

(Image source: The Story of Stuff Project)

From Salon:

For a long time, tactical urbanism was associated with guerrilla gardeners and fly-by-night pop-up parks, whereas large-scale “city planning” was seen as the job of bureaucrats with blueprints. But more and more often, City Hall is taking a more active (as opposed to purelyreactive) role in these types of smaller, cheaper, localized efforts, and sometimes even leading them. “Tactical urbanism has always been a combination of both bottom-up and top-down,” says Mike Lydon, a principal at the Street Plans Collaborative, an urban planning firm, “but now you’re seeing more of these ideas proliferate at the municipal level.”

In a way, thinking small is the next logical step in America’s urban renaissance. When cities really started changing 10 or 15 years ago, the economy was booming and the Internet was a newfangled gizmo. Today, cities have less money but more ways to communicate, two conditions perfectly suited to more focused, low-cost planning. Now you can home in on a specific neighborhood (or even just a few blocks), find out what the residents there want or need, cheaply implement it on a trial basis, and make it permanent if it works.

“We try to distinguish tactical urbanism from DIY urbanism and other similar movements,” says Lydon. “The intent is always to make something long-term and permanent.” In essence, cheap, ephemeral projects act as advertisements for better infrastructure. A roll-up crosswalk ends up painted onto the street by the city. An instant playground is taken over and maintained by the parks department. Just last week in Cleveland, after a pop-up cycle track was removed after its one-week lifespan, locals, disappointed to see it gone, starting asking the city for a permanent one to replace it.

Its easy to see why penny-pinching local governments would want to get in on this. The pedestrianization of Times Square, which began in 2009 as a pilot program that utilized little more than paint, orange traffic barrels and $10 lawn chairs, was a landmark moment in city-sanctioned tactical urbanism (the plaza has since been upgraded with curbs and sturdier seating). That same year, San Francisco launched Pavement to Parks, an initiative to turn underused street space into pedestrian refuges. Upon dedicating the first one, Mayor Gavin Newsom acknowledged that the city was catching up with what was already a grass-roots phenomenon. “I know that many of you have been talking about this for … at least 13 or 14 years,” he said. “Formally, it’s been at least a decade since community groups came together and talked about converting this pavement into a plaza.”

New York and San Francisco were early adopters, but Ethan Kent, vice president of the nonprofit Project for Public Spaces (PPS), says that until recently, such efforts existed as “a cool trend, but not the paradigm shift” that’s now transforming official policy. Last week in Philadelphia, for instance, the chief of staff for the mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utilities announced that the city would add more parklets and pedestrian plazas this year, building on the success of the Porch, a public plaza created in November out of underused space near 30th Street Station for the low cost (by municipal standards) of $300,000. This “Lighter Quicker Cheaper” endeavor, as PPS calls it, resulted in a space where less turned out to be more: Instead of spending lots of money to program it, it was left flexible for people to program themselves. Today, depending on when you show up at the Porch, you could find a fitness class, a farmer’s market, a live performance, or some of the 16,000 people who work within a five-minute walk eating lunch there.

…

“The ‘Lighter Quicker Cheaper’ method gets people focused on the uses,” says Kent. “Typically people can’t see how they can change the public realm because they feel like they’re depending on big capital projects.” But when city governments become tactical urbanists, it combines the best of both worlds: a space provided and sanctioned by the city, but one that the community can remake in its own image.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Related:

• Free download: ‘Tactical Urbanism 2: Short-Term Action, Long Term Change’ (PDF)
• ‘The Official Guide to Tactical Urbanism’ (Atlantic Cities)
• ‘Tactical Urbanism seizes the day’ (Better! Cities & Towns Online)

(Photo: Better! Cities & Towns Online)

These strategies come from a chapter written by leading urban sustainability expert Warren Karlenzig for the Post Carbon Institute’s excellent ‘Post Carbon Reader’. You can check out his blog and work here.

(Photo credit: Seed Magazine via Urbanism.org)

Beyond Growth: ‘Gross Domestic Happiness’

From TVO:

The British government measures progress not just by how the economy is growing, but also by the quality of life of its citizens. The United States is following the UK’s lead and looking at how it can incorporate wellbeing into its census data. The move is based on the idea that on its own, GDP is an incomplete measure of a country’s success. Can you judge success by economic growth alone? Will measuring happiness help government make better policy?

Hermann Scheer (1944-2010), economist, politician, solar advocate and champion of Germany’s groundbreaking Renewable Energy Act, in one of his final interviews. You can read the rest of the interview over at Energy Bulletin.

(Image: The world’s first commercial solar tower in Sanlúcar La Mayor, Spain. Source: Walrus Magazine)

Reuters Video | Eco-Transport System Gives French City Clean, Green Travel Alternatives

The pioneering city of La Rochelle, France has had a bike share service since the 1970s. Now electric cars have been added to the program and the city has plans to build a clean, green future through other infrastructure improvements and citizen support. The video clip highlights these efforts before hearing some encouraging words from a couple of locals. Good stuff!